Books by Marlene Schäfers
The University of Chicago Press
A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women’s voices in contem... more A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women’s voices in contemporary Turkey.
“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.
Articles by Marlene Schäfers
This is a feature on CSSH Blog curated and carefully put together by Andrew Shryock - whose intro... more This is a feature on CSSH Blog curated and carefully put together by Andrew Shryock - whose intro I pinch here: Some topics come at CSSH like waves, and their comparative potential is too big for a single issue to hold. In 2024-2025, we received so many manuscripts about the social life of death that we could not group them fast enough. We placed them under a variety of rubrics, where they made perfectly good sense, but four of these essays had a special gravity. They seemed to be pulling toward each other across our production schedule. We’ve decided to create a special “Under the Rubric” – spanning issues 67/4 and 68/1 – to accommodate their palpable attraction.
Consider this package a holiday gift, in four parts:
Foroogh Farhang. Death of the Gharīb: A Window towards a Regional Understanding of Displacement in the Middle East. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2025;67(4):761-784.
Marlene Schäfers and Maria Kastrinou. Martyrs, Dreams, and Past Lives: Insurgent Immortality and the Expansive Logic of Debt. Comparative Studies in Society and History. FirstView.
Lucie Ryzova. Portrait of a Martyr as a Young Man: Social Lives of Photographs in Revolutionary Egypt. Comparative Studies in Society and History. FirstView.
Stephanie V. Love. The Archive of Displacement: Vernacular History and Urban Cemeteries in Oran, Algeria. Comparative Studies in Society and History. FirstView.
The essays have much in common: they are set in the Middle East; they examine multiple aspects of martyrdom; they fix our attention on the fact that the dead are a living force in political struggles, in resistance; and they show how pervasively urban landscapes are shaped and re-shaped by the movement of the dead—their bodies, names, and our memories of them. Most of all, the essays explore how hard it is for us to let the dead go and to bury them finally in one place. It is hard, too, for the dead to ignore us. As our authors show, the living and dead endlessly interact in the liminal spaces they co-create.
We invited Farhang, Schäfers, Kastrinou, Ryzova, and Love to read each other’s essays and respond. They chose to do so in letters. As you’ll see, the impact of their shared insights is deep and sometimes unexpected, but it carries the fortifying effect of a vigil or a memorial at graveside. Each author is fully aware that she writes in a time of genocide, state collapse, ruthless dispossession, and historical trauma. None writes exclusively about Palestine, but Gaza is the backdrop and brutal intensifier of all their arguments. Beneath the carnage of the moment, each paper connects to older motifs. The stranger. The icon. Graves. Spirits. Martyrs. Mourning. Reincarnation. Resurrection. Blessings and curses. Paradise. It is a rich assemblage of ideas. It generates a feeling of responsibility for the dead.
We always ask you to read the articles before scrolling down. We do so again, this time hoping you will notice that something ineffable is swirling through these essays. Something barely named. Is it the moral challenge of the “gharib,” the stranger? Is it the “anti-power” of death? Can we, the living, know?
Join us in thinking it through.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2025
Stories of fallen Kurdish revolutionaries who return to the living in dreams, and of Druze souls ... more Stories of fallen Kurdish revolutionaries who return to the living in dreams, and of Druze souls who circulate across securitized borders gesture at forms of vitality and animation that persist beyond biological death. In this article, we have put forward the concept of "insurgent immortality" to make sense of the political potency of revolutionary martyrs and past lives among Kurdish communities from Turkey and Syrian Druze communities in the Israelioccupied Golan Heights. By insisting on the immortality of their dead, we argue, these stateless communities articulate a claim to counter-sovereignty. What makes these communities' practices aimed at mastering and transcending death different from the sovereignty claimed by nation-states is that apparitions of dead martyrs and past lives work as expansive, boundary crossing mechanisms, rather than the territorializing logics of enclosure and containment that mark state sovereignty. The immortality we describe in this article is insurgent because it relies on the recognition and cultivation of long-term exchange relations between the living and the dead, through which debt becomes a modality of generative expansion across both this and otherworldly times and spaces. The resulting sense of generalized indebtedness opens up spaces of liminality in which the dead come alive as both inspiring and unsettling figures. We develop insurgent immortality as a comparative concept that emerges from the specific ethnography of each case yet reaches across their contextual boundedness. In this way, we hope to inspire renewed conversation about shared trajectories of resistance, including its ambivalences, that arise in contexts of statelessness, occupation, and disenfranchisement.
Anthropological Quarterly, 2023
Many followers of the socialist Kurdish liberation movement surround themselves with photographs ... more Many followers of the socialist Kurdish liberation movement surround themselves with photographs of fallen militants who they respect and cel- ebrate as martyrs. These images hold considerable power: they are able to direct speech, shape bodily comportment, and command the everyday lives of their spectators. This paper asks where this potency stems from and what effects it has. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Kurdish communities in Turkey and Europe, it argues that displays of martyrs’ pho- tographs project a Kurdish body politic in the making, enrolling both those whom they depict and those who handle them into an alternative project of sovereignty that remains under acute assault. Key to this effect is how the photographs make the dead latent in the present. On the one hand, this makes the images immensely powerful media of political mobiliza- tion. Embodying the sacrifice of lifetime made by the fallen, the images become powerful vectors for feelings of indebtedness, commitment, and dedication that make distinct demands on the disposable time of those who contemplate them. On the other hand, photography’s capacity to make the absent present and thereby upset linear emplotments of time also makes it a potentially unsettling medium. As a result, photographs of martyrs become crucial sites where political belonging and commitment are fashioned, consolidated, and potentially rebelled against.
Mekânda Adalet ve Deprem, 2022
2016 yılında Social Anthropology 24(2) dergisinde “Ruined Futures: Managing Instability in Post-E... more 2016 yılında Social Anthropology 24(2) dergisinde “Ruined Futures: Managing Instability in Post-Earthquake Van (Turkey)" başlığı ile yayınlanmış makalenin Türkçeye çevirilmiş ve kısaltılmış versiyonu.
İngilizceden çeviren: Esril Bayrak ve Ceren Yartan
Kurdish Studies, 2022
In this interview, founder and long-time managing editor of Kurdish Studies, Dr Welat Zeydanlıoğl... more In this interview, founder and long-time managing editor of Kurdish Studies, Dr Welat Zeydanlıoğlu, tells the story of the journal's establishment and recalls its development to becoming the leading English-speaking journal in the field of Kurdish studies today. He explains the relations between the journal and the Kurdish Studies Network, reflects on the difficulties that the journal has faced over the years, and outlines its major contributions to the field. The interview sheds light not only on the history of a journal but on the development of an entire scholarly field, while sketching the challenges lying ahead.
Kurdish Studies, 2021
In this interview, Prof. Shahrzad Mojab reflects on her longstanding personal, political, and int... more In this interview, Prof. Shahrzad Mojab reflects on her longstanding personal, political, and intellectual engagement with Kurdish women. Twenty years after publishing the groundbreaking edited volume Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds (Mazda Publishers, 2001), Mojab assesses the complex relation between Kurdish Studies and feminism and evaluates current discussions regarding gendered power relations in Kurdish scholarship. Gender relations in Kurdish society and in Kurdish Studies can only be understood, she insists, when taking into account how gender intersects with capitalism, class, colonialism, nationalism, and patriarchy. Through her personal trajectory, the interview offers insight into the historical developments that have facilitated Kurdish women to increasingly be included in Kurdish Studies as both researchers and research participants.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2020
The Kurdish resistance movement, one often hears in Kurdistan, Turkey, and beyond, has brought mo... more The Kurdish resistance movement, one often hears in Kurdistan, Turkey, and beyond, has brought momentous change to a deeply patriarchal society and in this way paved the way for the empowerment of Kurdish women. Instead of discussing whether such empowerment has “actually” materialized, this article seeks to investigate what moral expectations, normative standards, and gendered subjectivities this narrative generates. The Kurdish case reveals how narratives of empowerment form a crucial part of the moral and gendered bargains that sustain and legitimate resistance movements. As they tie personal lives to political projects of resistance and liberation through notions like sacrifice, gift, and debt, such narratives shape political belonging and render critique a perilous undertaking. Tracing how Kurdish women seek to reconcile the dilemmas that arise as a result, the article reflects on the ways in which the political comes to be refracted in intimate realms of kinship and family. It contends that familial and personal relationships are crucial sites where expectations of political loyalty and allegiance take on shape and substance but are also negotiated and contested.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2020
Introduction to CSSAAME special section on loyalty and critique in resistance movements, with con... more Introduction to CSSAAME special section on loyalty and critique in resistance movements, with contributions on Kashmir, Western Sahara and Kurdistan
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2019
This article investigates how middle-aged to elderly Kurdish women in Turkey engage with large co... more This article investigates how middle-aged to elderly Kurdish women in Turkey engage with large collections of Kurdish music recordings in their possession. Framing them as archives, women mobilize these collections as central elements in a larger, ongoing Kurdish project of historical critique, which seeks to resist hegemonic state narratives that have long denied and marginalized Kurdish voices. While recognizing the critical intervention such archives make, the article contends that, to be heard as “history” with a legitimate claim to authority, subaltern voices often have to rely on the very hegemonic forms, genres, and discourses they set out to challenge. This means that subaltern projects of histor- ical critique walk a fine line between critique and complicity, an insight that nuances narratives that would approach subaltern voices predominantly from a perspective of resistance. At the same time, this article argues that a more complete picture of subaltern archives requires us to attend to the voices they contain not just as metaphors for resistance or political representation but also as acoustic objects that have social effects because of the way they sound. By outlining the affective qualities that voice recordings held for the Kurdish women who archived them, the article shows how their collections participated in carving out specific, gendered subject positions as well as forging a broader Kurdish sociality. Paying attention to history’s “acoustic register” (Hunt 2008), this suggests, promises to open up perspectives on subaltern historiography that go beyond binary frameworks of resistance and domination, critique and complicity.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2018
Women’s rights and human rights projects in Turkey and elsewhere routinely construe and celebrate... more Women’s rights and human rights projects in Turkey and elsewhere routinely construe and celebrate subaltern voice as an index of individual and collective empowerment. Through an ethnographic study of Kurdish women singers’ (dengbêjs) efforts to engage in their storytelling art in Turkey, this article questions the equation between “raising one’s voice” and having agency. It investigates two concrete instances in 2012, in Istanbul and Van, where Kurdish women publicly raised their voices. It shows that public audibility does not necessarily translate into agency, because these spaces, like most, discipline voices ideologically and sonically. Audibility is not a neutral achievement but an ideologically structured terrain that shapes voices and regulates whether and how they are heard and recognized. Voices routinely have ambiguous and even contradictory effects once they become audible in public. It is not simply a matter of “having voice” or “being silenced.”
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2017
Voice is a salient category in our contemporary lives. We speak of marginalized groups 'lacking v... more Voice is a salient category in our contemporary lives. We speak of marginalized groups 'lacking voice' and celebrate their efforts at 'raising their voices'; we are advised to listen to our 'inner voice' and be 'vocal' in our opinions. Such idioms closely associate voice with individuality, agency, and authority. Anthropologists have sought to denaturalize these associations, showing them to be the product of a particular ideology of voice that is neither universal nor inevitable. At the same time, they have also studied the effects that such associations have on imaginations of subjectivity as well as public and political life.
As an explicit category of conceptual and ethnographic focus, voice has entered the anthropological literature relatively recently. This entry charts out some of the principal ways in which anthropologists have approached voice, and the kind of literatures they have drawn upon to do so. It identifies the move to study sonic voices in tandem with metaphorical figures of voice as central to anthropological investigations of voice. It considers how doing so allows investigating the role of voice in the making of subjects, publics, and ideologies, as well as the impacts that sound technologies have on these processes. This entry suggests that voice is central to many key concepts in anthropology and social theory and that an explicit focus on voice is therefore of broader relevance for the discipline and beyond.
http://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/voice
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2017
This article focuses on the appeal that writing and authorship hold for Kurdish women singers in ... more This article focuses on the appeal that writing and authorship hold for Kurdish women singers in contemporary Turkey. It argues that authorship has come to the fore as an object of aspiration at a moment when a history of political silencing intersects with a more recent commodification of Kurdish culture. In this context, authorship constitutes an avenue for Kurdish women to insert themselves into struggles for political rights, discourses of history writing, and an emerging cultural market. Yet, as the analysis shows, becoming an author centrally relies on gaining access to means that allow materially inscribing voices and making them durable. Authorship therefore needs to be recognized as a fragile achievement, especially for subaltern authors, whose position is marked by restricted access to inscriptive means. Tracing Kurdish women's attempts at making their voices, quite literally, matter, the article contributes to our understanding of the politics of voice in the contemporary world.
Kürt Tarihi, Sep 2016
When I began doing research on women dengbêjs, I was repeatedly met with disbelief: But are there... more When I began doing research on women dengbêjs, I was repeatedly met with disbelief: But are there any female dengbêjs at all? Aren't dengbêjs always malewith the exception, perhaps, of famous Ayşe Şan and Meyrem Xan, both long dead? Women lament at funerals, yes, and they routinely sing lullabies, certainly, but female dengbêjs? Yet over the course of the following months I would discover that Kurdish women do indeed routinely raise their voices, not just at funerals or beside the cradle, but also to transmit personal and community history through the genre of the kilam. Mastery of the kilam is what I use as a working definition for what makes a dengbêj, a term that is otherwise difficult to circumscribe. Derived from the Arabic root k-l-m meaning to speak, talk, or express, the kilam is a genre closer to language than music. Ethnomusicologist Estelle Amy de la Bretèque describes it as a form of "melodized speech" which "resembles a chant" and which is "always associated with feelings of loss and self-sacrifice." 1
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, May 2016
This article investigates how ruined materialities are implicated in projects of governance by af... more This article investigates how ruined materialities are implicated in projects of governance by affecting people's abilities to engage with the future. Based on ethnographic material from the Kurdish-inhabited city of Van (Turkey), which was heavily damaged by two earthquakes in 2011, I analyse Turkish state authorities' mobilisation of expertise regarding Van's ruined built environment as a form of techno-political governance. Yet as ruins' material properties continuously exceeded attempts at governing them, they created a particular structure of risk, thereby contributing to the formation of political subjects feeling themselves to be at the constant peril of both natural and political disaster.
European Journal of Turkish Studies, 2015
Over the last decade the art of dengbêjî [Kurdish minstrelsy] has come to be understood as the pa... more Over the last decade the art of dengbêjî [Kurdish minstrelsy] has come to be understood as the paradigmatic form of Kurdish heritage and dengbêjs concomitantly as the authentic carriers of Kurdish “culture.” This article seeks to outline some of the complexities and paradoxes of this ongoing process of Kurdish heritage production as it occurs at the intersection of growing liberal multiculturalist and continuing repressive forms of governance in Turkish Kurdistan. I argue that the production of Kurdish cultural heritage as it unfolds on a highly politicized terrain relies on an understanding of heritage as a marker of collective primordial identity, which goes hand in hand with an idealization of culture as a sphere of prepolitical pristine authenticity. Moreover, this article also seeks to shed light on some of the specifically gendered dynamics involved in contemporary Kurdish heritage making by asking what promises the evocation of dengbêjî as explicitly distinct from politics may hold for a number of female dengbêjs.
Book Chapters by Marlene Schäfers
Kurdish Women Through History, Culture and Resistance, 2024
In: Kurdish Women Through History, Culture and Resistance edited by Shahrzad Mojab, 123-147. Cost... more In: Kurdish Women Through History, Culture and Resistance edited by Shahrzad Mojab, 123-147. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers.
Kurdish women in Turkey find themselves urged to raise their voices by a plethora of actors. The Kurdish political movement calls on them to voice their opinions as part of its efforts to promote gender equality and social progress, while Turkish state authorities encourage their presence on television screens and festival stages as tokens of Turkey’s new-found tolerance toward its minority populations. Women’s rights campaigners call upon Kurdish women to be vocal in the name of female empowerment, while mental health counselors encourage them to talk about experiences of political and domestic violence as a path toward healing and reconciliation. This chapter examines the consequences of this contemporary political constellation that incites Kurdish women to raise their voices in the name of empowerment, emancipation, and representation. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Kurdistan with Kurdish female singers, poets, and women’s activists, I argue that “raising one’s voice” is not always or necessarily empowering but constitutes an endeavor full of risk, dilemma, and contradiction.
To make this argument, the chapter foregrounds the social labor that voices routinely carry out because of how they sound, rather than approaching the voice primarily as a symbolic or representational trope. Taking on such a perspective reveals how Kurdish women’s voices become potent social forces thanks to the specifics of their acoustic qualities, narrative composition, and poetic elaboration. As much as these voices express powerful sentiments and emotions, they are not necessarily bound to the interiority of those who pronounce them. In long-standing Kurdish oral repertoires, for instance, female voices often constitute a vehicle to express not the pain of the self but that of another, telling the tragic fate of (typically male) close and loved ones. But the chapter also charts how this vocal aesthetics is rapidly changing as Kurdish women are encouraged to approach their voices as vehicles of self-expression and individual agency. Focusing on the life and work of two modern Kurdish women singers, it traces the emergence of a novel vocal aesthetics in which the voice increasingly becomes the means to express women’s own, personal suffering. These changes in vocal form, I argue, mirror the demands of contemporary representational politics, where voices can only become politically consequential if they accurately represent the self of those who enunciate them. Yet it would be wrong to read these transformations simply as a long overdue form of empowerment through self-expression. As the chapter shows, they also open up new challenges, fears, and anxieties that women must face.
From Van to Yerevan: Dengbêj Gazin - Ashugh Leyli.
CD produced by Kalan Music (2017), in collabo... more From Van to Yerevan: Dengbêj Gazin - Ashugh Leyli.
CD produced by Kalan Music (2017), in collaboration with Anadolu Kültür.
Part of the "Women Ashughs and Dengbêjs Project" that took place in 2014-15 within the framework of the Support to the Armenia-Turkey Normalisation Programme, funded by the European Union.
Diversity and Contact among Singer-Poet Traditions in Eastern Anatolia, 2019
Published in: Özdemir, Ulaş, Wendelmoet Hamelink and Martin Greve (eds), 2019. Diversity and Cont... more Published in: Özdemir, Ulaş, Wendelmoet Hamelink and Martin Greve (eds), 2019. Diversity and Contact among Singer-Poet Traditions in Eastern Anatolia. Ergon: Baden-Baden.
Methodological Approaches in Kurdish Studies: Theoretical and Practical Insights from the Field, 2018
Northern Kurdistan constitutes a politically highly polarized place. Decades of armed conflict ac... more Northern Kurdistan constitutes a politically highly polarized place. Decades of armed conflict accompanied by assimilationist government and violent displacement have unsettled, transformed and deeply divided Kurdish society. On the troubled terrain of Kurdish politics, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and associated organisations have established a position of hegemony within a polarized world that pits the Turkish state against Kurdish resistance, ‘collaborating’ village guards against ‘honourable’ Kurdish patriots. As a result, questions of loyalty and allegiance occupy paramount significance in everyday interactions in today’s Northern Kurdistan.
This paper investigates some of the consequences, difficulties and dilemmas that such polarization entails for ethnographic fieldwork. Based on 17 months of fieldwork experience in the region of Van (2011/12), I argue that the polarized political context puts high pressure on individuals to position themselves in relation to dominant political players. Researchers are not exempt from such pressures, and inevitably find themselves drawn into existing webs of allegiance. Arguing that there is no neutral position from which to carry out research, the paper advocates tracing the boundaries that demarcate spaces of loyalty as a methodology for reckoning with the politicization of everyday life. It outlines how political identities are formed and authority is constituted through the performative enactment, maintenance and negotiation of such boundaries.
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Books by Marlene Schäfers
“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.
Articles by Marlene Schäfers
Consider this package a holiday gift, in four parts:
Foroogh Farhang. Death of the Gharīb: A Window towards a Regional Understanding of Displacement in the Middle East. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2025;67(4):761-784.
Marlene Schäfers and Maria Kastrinou. Martyrs, Dreams, and Past Lives: Insurgent Immortality and the Expansive Logic of Debt. Comparative Studies in Society and History. FirstView.
Lucie Ryzova. Portrait of a Martyr as a Young Man: Social Lives of Photographs in Revolutionary Egypt. Comparative Studies in Society and History. FirstView.
Stephanie V. Love. The Archive of Displacement: Vernacular History and Urban Cemeteries in Oran, Algeria. Comparative Studies in Society and History. FirstView.
The essays have much in common: they are set in the Middle East; they examine multiple aspects of martyrdom; they fix our attention on the fact that the dead are a living force in political struggles, in resistance; and they show how pervasively urban landscapes are shaped and re-shaped by the movement of the dead—their bodies, names, and our memories of them. Most of all, the essays explore how hard it is for us to let the dead go and to bury them finally in one place. It is hard, too, for the dead to ignore us. As our authors show, the living and dead endlessly interact in the liminal spaces they co-create.
We invited Farhang, Schäfers, Kastrinou, Ryzova, and Love to read each other’s essays and respond. They chose to do so in letters. As you’ll see, the impact of their shared insights is deep and sometimes unexpected, but it carries the fortifying effect of a vigil or a memorial at graveside. Each author is fully aware that she writes in a time of genocide, state collapse, ruthless dispossession, and historical trauma. None writes exclusively about Palestine, but Gaza is the backdrop and brutal intensifier of all their arguments. Beneath the carnage of the moment, each paper connects to older motifs. The stranger. The icon. Graves. Spirits. Martyrs. Mourning. Reincarnation. Resurrection. Blessings and curses. Paradise. It is a rich assemblage of ideas. It generates a feeling of responsibility for the dead.
We always ask you to read the articles before scrolling down. We do so again, this time hoping you will notice that something ineffable is swirling through these essays. Something barely named. Is it the moral challenge of the “gharib,” the stranger? Is it the “anti-power” of death? Can we, the living, know?
Join us in thinking it through.
İngilizceden çeviren: Esril Bayrak ve Ceren Yartan
As an explicit category of conceptual and ethnographic focus, voice has entered the anthropological literature relatively recently. This entry charts out some of the principal ways in which anthropologists have approached voice, and the kind of literatures they have drawn upon to do so. It identifies the move to study sonic voices in tandem with metaphorical figures of voice as central to anthropological investigations of voice. It considers how doing so allows investigating the role of voice in the making of subjects, publics, and ideologies, as well as the impacts that sound technologies have on these processes. This entry suggests that voice is central to many key concepts in anthropology and social theory and that an explicit focus on voice is therefore of broader relevance for the discipline and beyond.
http://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/voice
Book Chapters by Marlene Schäfers
Kurdish women in Turkey find themselves urged to raise their voices by a plethora of actors. The Kurdish political movement calls on them to voice their opinions as part of its efforts to promote gender equality and social progress, while Turkish state authorities encourage their presence on television screens and festival stages as tokens of Turkey’s new-found tolerance toward its minority populations. Women’s rights campaigners call upon Kurdish women to be vocal in the name of female empowerment, while mental health counselors encourage them to talk about experiences of political and domestic violence as a path toward healing and reconciliation. This chapter examines the consequences of this contemporary political constellation that incites Kurdish women to raise their voices in the name of empowerment, emancipation, and representation. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Kurdistan with Kurdish female singers, poets, and women’s activists, I argue that “raising one’s voice” is not always or necessarily empowering but constitutes an endeavor full of risk, dilemma, and contradiction.
To make this argument, the chapter foregrounds the social labor that voices routinely carry out because of how they sound, rather than approaching the voice primarily as a symbolic or representational trope. Taking on such a perspective reveals how Kurdish women’s voices become potent social forces thanks to the specifics of their acoustic qualities, narrative composition, and poetic elaboration. As much as these voices express powerful sentiments and emotions, they are not necessarily bound to the interiority of those who pronounce them. In long-standing Kurdish oral repertoires, for instance, female voices often constitute a vehicle to express not the pain of the self but that of another, telling the tragic fate of (typically male) close and loved ones. But the chapter also charts how this vocal aesthetics is rapidly changing as Kurdish women are encouraged to approach their voices as vehicles of self-expression and individual agency. Focusing on the life and work of two modern Kurdish women singers, it traces the emergence of a novel vocal aesthetics in which the voice increasingly becomes the means to express women’s own, personal suffering. These changes in vocal form, I argue, mirror the demands of contemporary representational politics, where voices can only become politically consequential if they accurately represent the self of those who enunciate them. Yet it would be wrong to read these transformations simply as a long overdue form of empowerment through self-expression. As the chapter shows, they also open up new challenges, fears, and anxieties that women must face.
CD produced by Kalan Music (2017), in collaboration with Anadolu Kültür.
Part of the "Women Ashughs and Dengbêjs Project" that took place in 2014-15 within the framework of the Support to the Armenia-Turkey Normalisation Programme, funded by the European Union.
This paper investigates some of the consequences, difficulties and dilemmas that such polarization entails for ethnographic fieldwork. Based on 17 months of fieldwork experience in the region of Van (2011/12), I argue that the polarized political context puts high pressure on individuals to position themselves in relation to dominant political players. Researchers are not exempt from such pressures, and inevitably find themselves drawn into existing webs of allegiance. Arguing that there is no neutral position from which to carry out research, the paper advocates tracing the boundaries that demarcate spaces of loyalty as a methodology for reckoning with the politicization of everyday life. It outlines how political identities are formed and authority is constituted through the performative enactment, maintenance and negotiation of such boundaries.